Mutex wrote:Well, other than the lack of daylight you get all those things with open plan too. Which is the only other option I've seen, in fact the ONLY kind of office I've worked in. Cubicles at least muffle the sound of other conversations and give people a little more privacy.

What other office layouts have you worked in? Did everyone get their own office or something?

Offices for 2 to roughly 4 people, with windows on one side and a door on the other side. A corridor in between, and another row of offices on the other side of the corridor. The walls go up to the ceiling, but can typically be moved fairly easily. A meeting room for every few offices.

Whenever I've seen office slike speising's on American TV shows, I've assumed it was because the character was high up enough in the company to warrant their own room. Is it really usual for everyone to be in small rooms like that in some office buildings?

Zamfir wrote:Offices for 2 to roughly 4 people, with windows on one side and a door on the other side. A corridor in between, and another row of offices on the other side of the corridor. The walls go up to the ceiling, but can typically be moved fairly easily. A meeting room for every few offices.

How many total people are you talking here? Everyone has a window? I mean either its a tiny building or theres a ton of wasted space in the middle. I mean hell we have a cafeteria and atrium thats takes up the entire center of our building (caf on ground, open space on the 2nd and third floors) and we still have people in cubicles nowhere near a window. Theres no way we could give everyone an office. Management has offices but I dont think any except the executives have windows since they’re all on the inside so that you maximize the daylight in the building.

Two-four people in an office would be a dream, guess it takes a decent amount of floor space though. The trend in London is to pack people into ever smaller open-plan offices.

I think the main cost is outer walls. Cubicles or open-plan allow you to put people further away from windows. Space is more relative - you can make the offices very small, or stick many people in them, and end up at any density. At some density point, open space or cubicles might feel larger than tiny offices, but at that point I'd say the amount of allocated space is questionable anyway.

London at least has the excuse that space is very expensive, and employees might be happier to get the money than the space.

Thats where Americans surprise me. You find these office buildings with parking lots the size of a minor city in the Netherlands. Filled with trucks the size of a median Dutch house. No lack of space, clearly. You talk to people who are fairly senior and well-paid. They don't work there for lack of options. But cubicle farms (sometimes spacious and luxurious) for everyone except higher management.

Edit: @Chen: it means the building can't be wide. But nothing stops it from being high, long, or having multiple wings to get the desired size.

I think this quote captures it best: "[An open office is] an open expanse of proximal employees choosing to isolate themselves as best they can (e.g. by wearing large headphones) while appearing to be as busy as possible (since everyone can see them)"http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ ... 3/20170239

Productivity requires privacy as well as collaboration. You actually have to get your work done, not just talk about it.

When you have an open office, everyone is thrown together without regard to what they are doing or how they might work together. What interaction it facilitates would be casual "watercooler chitchat", which interferes with work. The default is then to just try to get your work done without distraction. But if everyone had offices or cubicles, and one needed or wanted to talk F2F with another, that is still possible, easy, and the resulting conversation would be focused, and thus productive.

So perhaps this could work with small teams (2-4) and productivity would increase. But with too many people thrown together, the loss of privacy and the increase in (potential) distraction overwhelms the (small) potential gain from more collaboration.

A more interesting study would be to look at, wherever cooperation occurs, how and why this collaboration affects productivity. Not all communication is collaboration, and not all collaboration is helpful.

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Please help addams if you can. She needs all of us.

Mutex wrote:I wonder how that works. Maybe being in an open, noisy environment makes people feel less secure so they go out of their way to reduce further contact and "close up" a lot. While people in cubicles feel more secure and are more willing to initiate contact with other people.

This is key. Open-plan office design is a cheap way for management to make everyone feel like someone else might be looking over their shoulder.

"'Legacy code' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrupwww.commodorejohn.com - in case you were wondering, which you probably weren't.

speising wrote:this is where i work. we are two persons in there.untitled.jpg

Are you both on the desk visible in that pic, or is there another desk on the other side of the room?

Two-four people in an office would be a dream, guess it takes a decent amount of floor space though. The trend in London is to pack people into ever smaller open-plan offices.

there's another desk on the left, you can see his notebook. (and, theoretically, a desk opposite mine for a third person).of course, i'm not in the US, but you'd think space is more sparse in Old Europe.

Zamfir wrote:Lack of light. Noise from too many people in one room. Difficult to have sensitive conversations. Often impossible to regulate the temperature to your own preference. Usually goes together with small space, though of course you can cram too many people in an office as well. The creepy feeling that someone could be watching over your shoulder, if the space is designed that the walkway is directly behind your back.

A properly designed cubicle plan will not create noise when people are talking. I've worked in two call centers, both used cubicles. We have meeting rooms for sensitive conversations. Temperatures are often impossible to regulate at an office level (in my previous job we worked in small offices and there was only one central AC, and my room was always too warm - I feel much better here). In an office depending on the layout you can often have people looking over your shoulder as well - I've had that happen before.

The light point is very valid. In fact I would like to have a window I could actually open when it's not too hot or too cold. But other than that, I don't particularly mind cubicles. Sure I prefer an office, but it's OK if I don't have one. And it's not just a middle finger from management - offices are way more expensive.

We've got nice tall (maybe 5'6" - 5'8") cubicle walls which I love. I've known people that work in places with the shared office thing. That'd be pure torture for me; I can't focus as well with other people in close proximity like that. I feel nice and isolated in my cubicle. I've got a cheap desk fan to keep cool (being too cold is luckily never a problem for me). There's one large section of windows in one corner of the main office space, but I prefer artificial light to sunlight, so I don't care that it's not near me. They also installed some sort of white-noise/noise-cancelling system in the drop-ceiling a few months back. It's not perfect, but in general the only noise I hear is from cubicles that share a wall with mine or the one right across the pathway from me. Plus I keep headphones in most of the time when I'm working so it's not an issue.

And it's not just a middle finger from management - offices are way more expensive.

That s why the American attitude puzzles me. If you don't have much bargaining power, I get why you accept an office without much daylight. Better to bargain for money. Same for London offices, where that window is very expensive. But the Americans I have in mind can bargain for high salaries - typically higher than their European counterparts. They are just (in my opinion) remarkably easy about cost-cutting at their expense.

Part of it might be about the signal. If a window is not expected, then lack of a window doesn't mean much. But if it is expected, then a lack of a window is a red flag. It implies that management cares little about employee morale and retention - and this attitude is likely to show up in other ways as well.

speising wrote:this is where i work. we are two persons in there.untitled.jpg

Are you both on the desk visible in that pic, or is there another desk on the other side of the room?

Two-four people in an office would be a dream, guess it takes a decent amount of floor space though. The trend in London is to pack people into ever smaller open-plan offices.

there's another desk on the left, you can see his notebook. (and, theoretically, a desk opposite mine for a third person).of course, i'm not in the US, but you'd think space is more sparse in Old Europe.

If there's at least three of those desks in that office, then the space that office occupies is easily at least 6 to 8 cubicles in some parts of the building I work in.

I also love* how Trump makes no attempt to hide his naked egotism - how his constant craving for approval entirely colours his view of people:

The Trumpmeister wrote:Trump defended that he has praised Boris Johnson, who just this week resigned from May's cabinet in protest of her "soft" Brexit plan:

"I said he'd be a great prime minister. He's saying good things about me as president. He thinks I'm doing a great job. I am doing a great job, just in case you haven't noticed, but I do think Boris Johnson would be a great prime minister."

A London Underground station has been temporarily named after England's football manager.

Southgate Tube station was rebranded Gareth Southgate station from Monday morning for 48 hours, after the squad finished fourth in the World Cup. It was England's best result since 1990 when they also lost in the semi-final.

"We're delighted to be able to show our appreciation to Gareth and the team by renaming the station in his honour," Transport for London said.

The Piccadilly Line station, in Enfield, north London, will display the manager's name on its signs until the end of Tuesday.

One local resident said the temporary signage was a "fantastic" way to say thank you to the England manager.

Speaking at the station, she said: "He gets on with the job and he achieved those amazing results and lifted the whole nation's spirits. And this is a tribute to him in the very same manner - quiet, unassuming."

(The French have outdone us though by naming six of their stations after Frenchmen )

When my friends and I went on a barge err... cruise I guess, we were pretty good at doing the locks until we got to one where, unbeknown to us, the previous people had left the bottom open. So we opened the top, waited for it to fill up so we could go in... quite a while later it still hadn't started filling up. Then a lady with a trace of irritation in her voice pointed out we were filling up the marina connected to the bottom, and were on the verge of doing serious damage.

Having myself been canal-boating, I know how he did it, but it's hard to do. In descending, failing to close the upper fillers means emptying the lock to open the lower gates (that you're emptying through) is harder. And failing to close the lower-emptiers, whilst ascending, means you find it hard to open the top gates (that you're filling through). It's possible that, ascending or descending, the clumsy canalman was still stuck in-between the two (or had not even gotten into the lock, having merely forgotten to check the prior user had closed the further gates' through-lets, which indicates another person to blame!), but "in a hurry" he should have noticed how much longer he was taking to equalise whichever end he needed to open the gates for.

Unless the K&A has vastly dissimilar lock configurations than I'm (I use this word advisedly - >) 'familiar' with. But really, these Victorians tended to do things right, and where it went wrong it'll surely have been re-engineered 'correctly' well over a century ago for such a basic fault! (Which is not to say that it can't be deliberately drained. And I know boats can sometimes pull on actual plugs designed into canals. Though these are generally well signed.)

At the heart of the European Commission’s case was the question of whether Google had abused its power ... While Google gives Android away to handset makers, those companies must effectively pre-install 11 Google apps on their devices, giving Google’s products far greater reach and more users to click on its ads.

...

In another remedy, European officials ordered that Google must allow handset manufacturers to create their own versions of Android software, otherwise known as “forks.” Google had previously discouraged the rise of competing smartphone software based on Android by blocking manufacturers’ access to Google apps if they built devices using any alternative versions.

The case has parallels to a similarly significant action against Microsoft in the 2000s, when it was heavily penalized in Europe and the United States for using its power in the personal computer market to bundle in its own internet browser, boxing out its rivals. At the time, Google, a young upstart, was among those to complain about Microsoft’s practices.

Some Google rivals cheered Wednesday’s decision. Locking handset makers into deals with Google made it “very challenging to compete,” Gabriel Weinberg, chief executive of DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, said in an interview. “We would hope the U.S. would ultimately follow suit and take another look at this.”

I think that's fair enough really. We should all be for reducing barriers to entry for newcomers. More competition is good, it keeps the behemoths honest.

Then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's staff sought to protect him from exposure to toxic formaldehyde from an office desk last year, emails show — just months before his top political aides blocked the release of a report on health dangers from the same chemical.

Man fuck him. If he thinks it's good enough for his industry buddies to poison Americans, he can suck poison too.